Classic Poetry Series
Lisel Mueller - poems -
Publication Date: 2004
Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Lisel Mueller(February 8, 1924)
an American poet.
She was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. Her father, Fritz Neumann, was a professor at Evansville College. Her mother died in 1953. "Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments," she once wrote. She and her husband, Paul Mueller (d. 2001) built a home in Lake Forest, Illinois in the 1960s, where they raised two daughters and lived for many years. Mueller currently resides in a retirement community in Chicago. Her poems are extremely accessible, yet intricate and layered. While at times whimsical and possessing a sly humor, there is an underlying sadness in much of her work.
She graduated from the University of Evansville in 1944 and has taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
Mueller has written book reviews for the Chicago Daily News.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 A Day Like Any Other
Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor's desk or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It's not true that your life passes before you in rapid motion, but your watch suddenly ticks like an amplified heart, the hands freezing against a white that is a judgment. Otherwise nothing. The face in the mirror is still yours. Two men pass on the sidewalk and do not stare at your window. Your room is silent, the plants locked inside their mysterious lives as always. The queen-of-the-night refuses to bloom, does not accept your definition. It makes no sense, your scanning the street for a traffic snarl, a new crack in the pavement, a flag at half-mast -- signs of some disturbance in the world because your friend, the morning sun, has turned its dark side toward you.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 Alive Together
Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard's woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope or a peasant wife with not enough food and not enough love, with my children dead of the plague. I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth. I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet. I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend. I might have been you. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who-but for endless ifs- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 Another Version
Our trees are aspens, but people mistake them for birches; they think of us as characters in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin living contentedly in the country. Our friends from the city watch the birds and rabbits feeding together on top of the deep, white snow. (We have Russian winters in Illinois, but no sleighbells, possums instead of wolves, no trusted servants to do our work.) As in a Russian play, an old man lives in our house, he is my father; he lets go of life in such slow motion, year after year, that the grief is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple that won't go up or down. But like the three sisters, we rarely speak of what keeps us awake at night; like them, we complain about things that don't really matter and talk of our pleasures and of the future: we tell each other the willows are early this year, hazy with green.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 Bedtime Story
The moon lies on the river like a drop of oil. The children come to the banks to be healed of their wounds and bruises. The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises come to be healed of their rage. The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften, the birds in their throats awake. They all stand hand in hand and the trees around them, forever on the verge of becoming one of them, stop shuddering and speak their first word.
But that is not the beginning. It is the end of the story, and before we come to the end, the mothers and fathers and children must find their way to the river, separately, with no one to guide them. That is the long, pitiless part, and it will scare you.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 6 Blood Oranges
In 1936, a child in Hitler's Germany, what did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero's face in the paper. No one told me about a poet for whose sake I might have learned Spanish bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I knew of Spain were those precious imported treats we splurged on for Christmas. I remember pulling the sections apart, lining them up, sucking each one slowly, so the red sweetness would last and last -- while I was reading a poem by a long-dead German poet in which the woods stood safe under the moon's milky eye and the white fog in the meadows aspired to become lighter than air.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 7 Curriculum Vitae
1992
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 8 The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 9 Five For Country Music
I. Insomnia
The bulb at the front door burns and burns. If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming through another endless night.
The moon knows the routine; it beats the bushes from east to west and sets empty-handed. Again the one she is waiting for has outrun the moon.
II. Old Money
The spotted hands shake as they polish the coins.
The shiny penny goes under the tongue, the two silver pieces weighted by pyramids will shut down the eyes.
All the rest is paper, useless in any world but this.
III. Home Movie
She knows that walk, that whistle, that knock.
It's the black wolf who sticks his floured paw underneath the door.
She tries not to open. One look at his face and she'll drop the gun. He will pick it up and turn it on her where she waits, her eyes shining, her hands over her head.
IV. Golden Boy
Whitewashed, the eyes refuse you.
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 10 And so the mouth must be serene, the muscles play, the body take an easy stance
to divert you from the two boarded-up chambers where someone has died.
V. Washing Day
Each year her laundry line gets lighter. One by one they disappear, ten little Indians. They take their socks, their jeans, their stiff plaid shirts.
Above the Ford on its concrete blocks, striped and zippered, her cotton dress flutters on and on.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 11 For A Thirteenth Birthday
You have read War and Peace. Now here is Sister Carrie, not up to Tolstoy; still it will second the real world: predictable planes and levels, pavement that holds you, stairs that lift you, ice that trips you, nights that begin after sunset, four lunar phases, a finite house.
I give you Dreiser although (or because) I am no longer sure. Lately I have been walking into glass doors. Through the car windows, curbs disappear. On the highway, wrong turnoffs become irresistible, someone else is controlling the wheel. Sleepless nights pile up like a police record; all my friends are getting divorced. Language, my old comrade, deserts me; words are misused or forgotten, consonants fight each other between my upper and lower teeth. I write "fiend" for "friend" and "word" for "world", remember comes out with an "m" missing.
I used to be able to find my way in the dark, sure of the furniture, but the town I lived in for years has pulled up its streets in my absence, disguised its buildings behind my back. My neighbor at dinner glances at his cuffs, his palms; he has memorized certain phrases, but does not speak my language. Suddenly I am aware
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 12 no one at the table does.
And so I give you Dreiser, his measure of certainty: a table that's oak all the way through, real and fragrant flowers, skirts from sheep and silkworms, no unknown fibers; a language as plain as money, a workable means of exchange; a world whose very meanness is solid, mud into mortar, and you are sure of what will injure you.
I give you names like nails, walls that withstand your pounding, doors that are hard to open, but once they are open, admit you into rooms that breathe pure sun. I give you trees that lose their leaves, as you knew they would, and then come green again. I give you fruit preceded by flowers, Venus supreme in the sky, the miracle of always landing on your feet, even though the earth rotates on its axis.
Start out with that, at least.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 13 Immortality
In Sleeping Beauty's castle the clock strikes one hundred years and the girl in the tower returns to the world. So do the servants in the kitchen, who don't even rub their eyes. The cook's right hand, lifted an exact century ago, completes its downward arc to the kitchen boy's left ear; the boy's tensed vocal cords finally let go the trapped, enduring whimper, and the fly, arrested mid-plunge above the strawberry pie fulfills its abiding mission and dives into the sweet, red glaze.
As a child I had a book with a picture of that scene. I was too young to notice how fear persists, and how the anger that causes fear persists, that its trajectory can't be changed or broken, only interrupted. My attention was on the fly: that this slight body with its transparent wings and life-span of one human day still craved its particular share of sweetness, a century later.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 14 Monet Refuses The Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don't see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolves night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don't know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 15 burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 16 Moon Fishing
When the moon was full they came to the water. some with pitchforks, some with rakes, some with sieves and ladles, and one with a silver cup.
And they fished til a traveler passed them and said, "Fools, to catch the moon you must let your women spread their hair on the water -- even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing net of shimmering threads, gasp and flop till its silver scales lie black and still at your feet."
And they fished with the hair of their women till a traveler passed them and said, "Fools, do you think the moon is caught lightly, with glitter and silk threads? You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks with those dark animals; what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"
And they fished with their tight, hot hearts till a traveler passed them and said, "Fools, what good is the moon to a heartless man? Put back your hearts and get on your knees and drink as you never have, until your throats are coated with silver and your voices ring like bells."
And they fished with their lips and tongues until the water was gone and the moon had slipped away in the soft, bottomless mud.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 17 Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids
Who is that man in black, walking away from us into the distance? The painter, they say, took a long time finding his vision of the world.
The mermaids, if that is what they are under their full-length skirts, sit facing each other all down the street, more of an alley, in front of their gray row houses. They all look the same, like a fair-haired order of nuns, or like prostitutes with chaste, identical faces. How calm they are, with their vacant eyes, their hands in laps that betray nothing. Only one has scales on her dusky dress.
It is 1942; it is Europe, and nothing fits. The one familiar figure is the man in black approaching the sea, and he is small and walking away from us.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 18 Reading The Brothers Grimm To Jenny
Jenny, your mind commands kingdoms of black and white: you shoulder the crow on your left, the snowbird on your right; for you the cinders part and let the lentils through, and noise falls into place as screech or sweet roo-coo, while in my own, real, world gray foxes and gray wolves bargain eye to eye, and the amazing dove takes shelter under the wing of the raven to keep dry.
Knowing that you must climb, one day, the ancient tower where disenchantment binds the curls of innocence, that you must live with power and honor circumstance, that choice is what comes true-- oh, Jenny, pure in heart, why do I lie to you?
Why do I read you tales in which birds speak the truth and pity cures the blind, and beauty reaches deep to prove a royal mind? Death is a small mistake there, where the kiss revives; Jenny, we make just dreams out of our unjust lives.
Still, when your truthful eyes, your keen, attentive stare, endow the vacuous slut with royalty, when you match
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 19 her soul to her shimmering hair, what can she do but rise to your imagined throne? And what can I, but see beyond the world that is, when, faithful, you insist I have the golden key-- and learn from you once more the terror and the bliss, the world as it might be?
Submitted by David Shackelford
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 20 Reasons for Numbers
1. Because I exist.
2. Because there must be a reason why I should cast a shadow.
. . .
10. Created functionless, for the sheer play of the mind in its tens of thousands of moves.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 21 Scenic Route
For Lucy, who called them "ghost houses."
Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wives along this road; they are everywhere, abandoned, leaning, turning gray.
Someone always traded the lonely beauty of hemlock and stony lakeshore for survival, packed up his life and drove off to the city. In the yards the apple trees keep hanging on, but the fruit grows smaller year by year.
When we come this way again the trees will have gone wild, the houses collapsed, not even worth the human act of breaking in. Fields will have taken over.
What we will recognize is the wind, the same fierce wind, which has no history.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 22 Sometimes, When the Light
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on, so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 23 The End of Science Fiction
This is not fantasy, this is our life. We are the characters who have invaded the moon, who cannot stop their computers. We are the gods who can unmake the world in seven days.
Both hands are stopped at noon. We are beginning to live forever, in lightweight, aluminum bodies with numbers stamped on our backs. We dial our words like Muzak. We hear each other through water.
The genre is dead. Invent something new. Invent a man and a woman naked in a garden, invent a child that will save the world, a man who carries his father out of a burning city. Invent a spool of thread that leads a hero to safety, invent an island on which he abandons the woman who saved his life with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.
Invent us as we were before our bodies glittered and we stopped bleeding: invent a shepherd who kills a giant, a girl who grows into a tree, a woman who refuses to turn her back on the past and is changed to salt, a boy who steals his brother's birthright and becomes the head of a nation. Invent real tears, hard love, slow-spoken, ancient words, difficult as a child's first steps across a room.
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Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 25 The Laughter Of Women
The laughter of women sets fire to the Halls of Injustice and the false evidence burns to a beautiful white lightness
It rattles the Chambers of Congress and forces the windows wide open so the fatuous speeches can fly out
The laughter of women wipes the mist from the spectacles of the old; it infects them with a happy flu and they laugh as if they were young again
Prisoners held in underground cells imagine that they see daylight when they remember the laughter of women
It runs across water that divides, and reconciles two unfriendly shores like flares that signal the news to each other
What a language it is, the laughter of women, high-flying and subversive. Long before law and scripture we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 26 Things
What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 27 What The Dog Perhaps Hears
If an inaudible whistle blown between our lips can send him home to us, then silence is perhaps the sound of spiders breathing and roots mining the earth; it may be asparagus heaving, headfirst, into the light and the long brown sound of cracked cups, when it happens. We would like to ask the dog if there is a continuous whir because the child in the house keeps growing, if the snake really stretches full length without a click and the sun breaks through clouds without a decibel of effort, whether in autumn, when the trees dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there above the shut-off level of our simple ears? For us there was no birth cry, the newborn bird is suddenly here, the egg broken, the nest alive, and we heard nothing when the world changed.
Lisel Mueller
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 28 Why We Tell Stories
For Linda Foster
I Because we used to have leaves and on damp days our muscles feel a tug, painful now, from when roots pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe they can fly, an instinct retained from when the bones in our arms were shaped like zithers and broke neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs we knew how far it was to the bottom as we floated open-eyed like painted scarves through the scenery of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak
2 We sat by the fire in our caves, and because we were poor, we made up a tale about a treasure mountain that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated, we invented impossible riddles only we could solve, monsters only we could kill, women who could love no one else and because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones that rose from the dark earth and sang
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 29 as white birds in the trees
3 Because the story of our life becomes our life
Because each of us tells the same story but tells it differently
and none of us tells it the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders want to enchant the children and grandfathers need to convince us what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only haphazardly, with one ear, we will begin our story with the word and
Lisel Mueller
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